Search engines tend to give high relavance to keywords in the domain name. Searching for ‘Pimp Costumes’? A domain with both keywords in the domain name is likely a good bet.
Best Tool For the Job posts a list of utilities.
DomainsBot is especially helpful because it accepts a list of words to spin into your next domain name.
Popularity: 42%
How do you build inertia in marketing? The more people you can get behind an idea (positively if possible) the more the idea builds upon itself until it reaches a critical mass. Take BitTorrent from Bram Cohen. Started as a pet project he now lives off the donations from users. Not selling the software, DONATIONS.
The perceived value BitTorrent’s users have in the software is worth more than setting a price that a traditional software company would value their software at. Many won’t donate at all, many will donate what they feel is the minimum and still others will donate more than what a company would charge because of the ‘warm fuzzies’ (to use my high school coach’s favorite saying) they get from the software and the good will trust the author has placed in his user’s hands.
What’s one of the easiest ways to kill inertia? Fine Print. If you are trying to do something good for the consumer (ie. provide them with a quailty product and top-notch buying experience) why inundate them with pages of fine print? It kind of kills the ‘warm fuzzies’ doesn’t it?
Seth Godin posts in Tiny cuts some examples of how fine print and poor customer service can kill any marketing effort.
Fine print is everywhere I look. Fine print means that a lawyer has made sure that you probably won’t win a lawsuit, but is the lawsuit really the point?
When did marketers fall in love with the idea of overselling and then hiding, instead of doing precisely the opposite?
Related Link: trigger leads
Popularity: 36%
NewsFactor Network reports in Search Engine Choice Affects Results that which search engine we choose effects the view we see of the web. I had always known that results can vary greatly from engine to engine. In tracking my own sites its easy to see the differences between first page, second page and latter rankings. The most interesting thing in the article though, is the number of unique links when comparing two or more engines on the same search terms.
When the results of two search engines were compared, 11 percent of the hits appeared in both results tables. That overlap dropped to 2.6 percent when three search engines were queried and to 1.1 percent among four search engines. On average, 74 percent of the first-page search results were unique to Ask Jeeves. Slightly less, or 71.2 percent, of Yahoo’s first-page results were unique.
MSN search results were close to Yahoo’s with 70.8 percent of the first-page results being listed only on that search engine. Nearly 67 percent of the first-page results for Google showed no overlap compared to the other search engines.
Popularity: 8%
Jason Calacanis offers a prize(?) to whoever can come up with a ‘kick butt’ list of the top 500 weblogs. $50,000 in advertising to anyone who could come up with a better ranking system or $10,000 cash to a programmer who creates such a system for his company.
To actually build a ranking system, you need the data. We need to build a bot to search and store all the metrics that we will rank on. While we’re at it, we might as well build a pinger that slurps posts as they happen.
Lets decide on the metrics…
This also assumes that the best way to rank the most popular blogs is how many inbound links they generate. What about just controversial blogs and hot topics? They generate a lot of buzz because of the polarizing nature of the controversy. Does controversy or buzz actually equate to popularity? I could say something outlandishly pro-Bush or anti-Bush that gets picked up by an well read blog or a search engine and generates 100,000 pageviews in a day but does that mean I’m popular? If we add a dampening factor of time, inbound links sustained week after week over a couple of months we would find a more accurate representation of relative popularity. But then what about bloggers that only post a couple of times a week?
What other options do we have for rankings? The number of feed subscribers? The number of daily visitors? The number of top ten search results everyday? Anything we come up with can eventually be gamed by anyone who wants to. Why do you think Google’s ranking is such a closely held secret?
What, now, is the point of a top 500 blogs of all genres? Blogging is a largely personal experience, its off the cuff, emotional and more of a conversation. You can find blogs on every subject known to man. Who gains from a popularity list other than the ego of those involved? If I want to read from an authority on Italian cooking would the top 500 get me anywhere? Maybe one or two blogs. Lumping every subject together in one big list thorws away one of the most important advantages of blogging compared to other forms of media… the individuality of subject.
Now we need a topic-based parameter.
Take the data gathered from this pinger/bot and build an interface that lets me manipulate the results like a fast food menu. ‘Give me 250 of the most actively linked blogs on PHP coding over the last 45 days’. Now thats a list that would be useful to me (today). Tomorrow could be a whole new list.
Give me some fancy buttons to post on my blog linking back to my top list and every other list out there would be playing catch up for the next year.
Screw the $10,000 I want in on the backend profits.
Popularity: 12%
Unless income is no object or your servers are so overloaded logs are a nusiance, logging is a required function of your webserver. How else do you know how much traffic you receive, where its coming from and where its going? From an admin standpoint, you can learn where you have broken links in your HTML code, if someone is stealing your images (ie. hotlinking), monitor performance and even debug Apache (something new I learned).
Linux Exposed - Logging and Monitoring Apache (Part 1)
Popularity: 10%
This is definitely worth following for a while to see if they can get it off of the ground.
The problem with any search algorithm, once the details are known, they can be manipulated. Will the human element be able to curb the tide of spammers who try to scew the results to their bottom line?
Maybe a user-centric model like WikiPedia could provide enough manpower to keep the relavancy high.
Popularity: 9%
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Ayn Rand: Atlas Shrugged |
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Neal Stephenson: Cryptonomicon |
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Jeremy D. Zawodny: High Performance MySQL |
